Godard famously said 'Every edit is a lie'. I totally agree. Every cut is a lie. Every shot is stolen. All stories are told. I am a nasty thief. This is a film student's diary.

Thursday, 26 May 2016

HARASSMENT BY CHAIRPERSON PARTHA GHOSE: OPEN LETTER TO I&B: SEXUAL HARASSMENT BATTLE AND THE MOB

To,

The Ministry of I&B, India,

ICC,

The Director,

SRFTI

Dear authority,

I am writing this letter to report the harassment that i had to face from the chairperson of the institute, SRFTI, Mr. Partha Ghosh. I am a sexual harassment complainant and had gone to report the numerous instances of intimidation and harassment that i was facing from the student body. After the ICC had found two professors guilty of sexual harassment, the violence from the students to me, other complainants and our supporters had shot up.

Yesterday, 24th May, 2016, i had gone to the director of the institute to report the most recent incident in which i was called ‘behen ke laudi’ and was threatened that ‘this happened outside the institute. You can’t do anything about it’. The director was in the chairperson’s room, talking to him. When i entered with junior student Kalhan Raina who is also facing intimidation and death threats, Mr Ghosh asked me what was in my hand. I said that it was my phone. He asked me to put it away. I asked him why. He said he couldn’t record what he was saying. I again asked why. He said that he wouldn’t talk to us if we were to quote him later. So i had to put my phone away.

When i started telling him and the director what i was being subjected to in the past couple of weeks, he started mocking me. He said that ‘taali ek haath se nahi bajta hai’, [you cannot clap with just one hand]. When i asked him what he meant by that he said that ‘till i saw the video of the professor i used to believe that it was a one-sided attack. But after seeing the video i now believe that it (violence against us) is response to your provocation’. He was referring to the video that i had uploaded of Mr. Subhadra Chowdhury, professor, who was found guilty of sexual harassment in which he was saying very objectionable things.

I asked the chairperson why he was not talking about the content of the video. I told him how that video was made for public viewing and how the person who had shot it had told the professor that he was shooting it. In fact the professor himself had given inputs on edit to the student. The chairperson did not listen to me.

Later when i pointed out that i was being threatened every day he started mocking me. What can we do? He asked me. I said i shouldn’t feel threatened in the campus. He mocked me again saying, ‘So what shall I do? I can post a security guard by your side who goes wherever you go’. At this point i couldn’t bear the humiliation any longer and i got up and said that it was absolutely mean and pathetic that he was talking to me that way. I said that if a student was feeling threatened the solution was not to employ guards but to remove the elements which are threatening the student. I said this and left the room.

I went back again once more still in tears to let him know that i have received yet another threat from a female student who is asking alumni to join hands in kicking insane elements like me out of the institute.

I am writing this to bring to your notice how a girl who spoke up against sexual harassment is constantly being harassed by students, faculty and the highest of authorities. My friends who stayed back in the room after i left crying told me that Mr Partha Ghosh had asked them to ‘please control kunjila’. Why is it that it is i who have to be controlled when the students and professors who unleashed terrible amount of violence on me are parading the institute without any sort of control over them. Why did Mr. Partha Ghosh ask me not to record if not to say such humiliating things to me and leave me with no evidence. Mr Kalhan Raina was present throughout the incident and he can testify to what i have said. The director of the institute was also present while i was being harassed even though i am not sure he will testify for me.

Please take action against this complaint.

Thanks,

kunjila

Kolkata,

25th May 2015

I have sent this letter to the Ministry of I and B and i am seeking justice. Meanwhile students here have ganged up more than ever, unleashing a vicious attack on us complainants. I am attaching the screenshots of some of the posts put up on social media directly attacking us complainants and calling us liars, mentally ill, pseudo feminists etc. The amount of violence in their posts itself is such and you can imagine how it must be when we take a walk on campus. It is horrible.

One of the students seeks the help of seniors to kick insane people like us out of the campus. The same person also goes ahead and calls me/complainants pseudo feminists. Says that we think that 'men on earth have only one aspiration in life-to rape women'.

In the following update you can see that a student is stating as a fact which is only her opinion which is 'Not all cases are true. not all women are victims. Some are plain politicians...There has been NO death threats. I repeat NO DEATH THREATS. NO abuse. DO NOT FALL FOR THESE. SOMEONE IS TRYING TO GET YOUR SYMPATHY. THEY ARE TRYING TO PULL YOU IN YOUR SENTIMENTS FOR A WOMEN. YOU ARE BEING USED. YOUR RESPECT FOR WOMEN IS BEING POLITICISED.

Now let me expose the lies mentioned by this student in a couple of seconds.

1. There was a death threat. A student had told his junior student (Kalhan) that he would be found in a pool of blood outside some day soon. Soon after that comment which was posted on one of my own posts on facebook, he deleted it and even made fun of the student by saying that the comment was now gone. Later he went on to say that it was only a joke. He himself put up a status saying his death threat was only a 'mole' (i am assuming molehill is what he meant) and that the person who got the threat was making a mountain out of it. Here is that post in which he is even mocking the student he threatened saying he is an 'asset' to SRFTI.

Again another student who keeps referring to me as a mental patient wrote to provide strength to the death threat student saying he was 'dealing with a bunch of insane psychopaths' and not to worry because 'there will be more dramas coming up, all you know that there's a complaint against you. Because you know complaints are the most powerful weapon for all the pseudo feminists across the world'.

2. Dispelling lie number two by the student which is that there has been NO abuse and that everything is cooked up by attention hungry students like me, i would ask the indian public plus SRFTI to go through the ICC report which has pronounced TWO professors GUILTY and have recommended the harshest of punishments. This is a quote directly from the office of the director of the institute and was reported in an article in a newspaper. There are four female students who made complaints against faculty and there are 2 complaints against one, 3 against the other and 1 against the third. I am really curious to know why the mob thinks that all these women one fine day decided to tell a bunch of lies and subject themselves to insane amounts of humiliation which is what is thrown at sexual harassment complainants in india, usually.

In the above status the same student spurts another series of lies. Dispelling them one by one and pointing out the stupidity of the argument?.

1.
'Under psychiatric treatment' is probably a shot at me, the only person
on campus who has written about her sessions with the shrink. Yes, i
take anti-depressants and mood stablisers and i attended sessions with a
shrink for a year to get out of depression. I don't see how that makes
me have a 'dented mind'. The absolute insensitivity towards mental
health issues and depression is the hallmark of SRFTI. The status just
proves it further.

2. The victims who prefer to be called survivors are happily roaming about.

At least in my case i can say that i have no problem with being called either a victim or a survivor. Yes, we are happily? (not too sure) roaming about. So what are we supposed to do? Shut ourselves in our rooms and not talk? Not happening people. I don't know which century you belong to, but i will fight sexual harassment tooth and nail, sitting in room, laughing when i feel like, crying when i feel like, sleeping, eating, not eating...doing things which normal people do because that is what we are too. People.

3. They do their regular work with other students.

There are no other students. It's us 6 and them 150. I am working with people, even girls, who don't even believe that i was raped and it is not easy. Regular work? No. The students have tried all they can to stop me from working by creating the most hostile environment and i still don't know how i will start my shoot in less than two weeks in such an environment. Every day is a battle. Every night is sleepless.

We stick to ourselves and are always with each other because there is no one left to talk to and there are only so many people who believe us. In the mess or the canteen if you see someone eating alone in all probability it is one of us. When we are not alone we are with one of us six.

Laugh loudly- again at me, i think, i have an extra loud laughter which is quite annoying. And yes, i will continue laughing because (again) yes, that's one of the things people do and i am people.

Badminton tournament: Happened ages ago and even on that occasion an announcement was made over the microphone that there would be a party, later corrected to 'bhajan keertan', mockingly. That was the morning in which i was called 'behen ke laudi' by one of the students and they hit an iron rod on a pole in the badminton court right in front of my room at 6 in the morning. So, isn't it better one doesn't mention 'play badminton and no one bats an eyelid'. By the way, why should anyone bat an eyelid? Why does it sound as if it is a miracle that nobody batted an eyelid. Freudian slips, i say. :)

4. Kalhan shooting a student only general body video.

Blatant lie. Kalhan never shot anything. He made an audio recording upon the request of some of the complainants because such 'student only' meetings were being used to spread lies. And yes, he caught a student representative lying. We checked with a lot of sources and still haven't understood what is wrong with recording a meeting which was supposed to be transparent. My request asking for the minutes of the meeting yielded no reply.

5. The student who was subjected to public trial walked in there by his own will.

Yes, of course he did. Such general body meetings are not expected to be violent. They are not supposed to be. The girl again makes a slip by suggesting that we be grateful that they are not from ancient india. It is nothing to be grateful or happy about. It is how things should be and it is how things were not in that meeting which was undemocratic to begin with. It is just as stupid as saying that we are nice people because we don't practise Sati anymore. Kalhan was subjected to harassment from 11.30 at night to 3.30 in the morning. A mob of around forty people surrounded him and kept asking him questions till the time a fellow complainant and i entered the terrace and questioned the mob. The mob turned violent against us and attacked the three of us in packs. That is, around forty students against the three or four of us. I have the audio recording of the mob in which one student can be heard yelling 'I am not scared of you Kunjila, I am not Shyamal Sengupta'. Mr. Sengupta, is a professor against three female students including me had complained. You can hear how people mocked us girls mimicking our voices, laughter etc, how we were booed and laughed at. There was even applause when the above mentioned dialogue was said.

By the way the female student spreading these lies has blocked me on Facebook. This is just a hint of how democratic SRFTI is and what its people's understanding of democracy is. I have not finished editing the 1.30 hour long audio recording because i have a film to shoot soon. Shall upload it and update here when i do that.

While we are being called names and being accused of being mentally ill i would also like my readers to go through the series i had published in my blog about my sessions with a shrink. I did that because i knew that a lot of women were going through similar problems and that it would help them. My own mother said that it was not wise for me to write about such things precisely because of the reason which has just unfolded in front of my eyes. That people will use it to paint me as an insane female. Insane is a monolithic idea for most people which immediately paints a picture of a woman chained to a cot or something such. Nobody understands depression. In fact in the controversial video of the professor there is a portion in which he says that there is nothing called 'depression' and that my suicide attempt was only because i had a mother who had money and who could stay in Kolkata to look after me. The truth is that a lot of people, especially women, wrote to me after i published that series and even got the number of my psychologist from me. One of them was the girl who called us 'psychopaths'. I hope she recovers from this time capsule she has shut herself in, denying the truth and believing the fake and the false. Women, i hope you find peace.

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